Google's semi-annual Transparency Report features detailed analysis and statistics for government takedown requests, broken down by nation. From this, I learned that Brazil's government sends more Google takedowns than anywhere else, thanks to the combination of a national election and the popularity of Orkut, Google's social networking service.

India's government generates the largest number of bogus takedowns. 88 percent of Indian government takedown requests to Google are denied: "We received requests from different law enforcement agencies to remove a blog and YouTube videos that were critical of Chief Ministers and senior officials of different states. We did not comply with these requests."

I suspect that takedown requests from government agencies represent a small fraction of their total takedown requests, especially on youtube (copyright infringement claims are unlikely to come from a govt agency).

It would be interesting to see similar data about non-governmental takedown requests.

Feck yeah, not one from the Swedish government! (atleast a little something to be grateful over) This is a great report but like Nosehat said: It would be interesting to see similar data about non-governmental takedown requests.

I can’t argue with the UK Gov’t asking to take down fraudulent AdWords items. But what’s with the six court cases in the US responsible for over 1,100 items being removed for defamation? Their wording as an explanation sounds like all six were for the same family.

“88 percent of Indian government takedown requests to Google are denied”. Should this be 78 percent? According to the report, 22 percent of requests were either wholly or partially complied with, which leaves 78 percent not complied with.